Your Writing Is Terrible: Summer Poetry Finished

I issued a challenge earlier in the week for writers to write a poem or short story about or set in the summertime, without using a list of certain words. That was kind of a big risk because I have almost no readership and having no responses would make me look sillier than I already am. Luckily at least two people responded (see the comments about 23 seconds after this post goes live to see one of them).

I’m admittedly not that great at poetry but I stumbled this one out — and I actually caught myself more than once using a word from the list of blasphemies. I threw a rock at a dove and jabbed a quill pen into my hand every time I did.

Jason posted something nostalgic in the comments of my last post. The rest of you who wrote something, post or link it up in the comments and congratulate yourself at being a little less terrible.

The Nowhere Race

Stopped red, crawled to a halt in the line of motorcars
A slip of gliding movement to my right, and up above blue waters
The slide and blur trails across the clear firmament

One, and one, and then more join in
Flaunting their freedom with caws and calls
Wafting above their lead in the race’s imbalance

Envious of their speed and grace
Tri-dimensional Klein bottle flyers
Overtake the train of sludging slugs on the flat earth

Finally a clearing: a twisted scene of metal and shaking limbs
Necks of rubber turn front, solid and steadfast
Straight ahead, one lane divides, my foot becomes concrete

To my right: the blessed visual parallax
Beige with sand and dual blue with Atlantic and air
I overtake my peers, then the gray flying atrocities

Those ill-mannered and smelly fish-manglers
I bite my knuckles at them in victory
But the fates, brazen, forestall my headway

Unseen red candy light ahead
Backed up the heady flow of wheels
The death-deserving beaked miscreants regain their lead

Not all is lost — I spy a distracted winged one
Stilled and gnawing an unfortunate plant
Sprouting from the cracked gray of hot sidewalk

I roll on, an off-ramp raises me to the finish line
Telemetric revenge-wish: I transmit mental curses out to my gulled opponents
Yet I smile, as coming in second-to-last never felt better